The BBC’s strange silence

In the long and illustrious history of race chancing, there must have been many more egregious examples than that of Noel Deans’s recourse to court because a colleague ‘fist-bumped’ him rather than shaking his hand, but I can’t think of any right now. Certainly not over here in the UK, where we still lag a little behind the inventiveness of the top American chancers.

The case brought by Mr Deans against RBG Holdings was one of racial discrimination. He alleged that on one occasion the firm’s senior partner, Ian Rosenblatt, greeted him with a fist-bump, which is apparently a common form of greeting among the African-Caribbean community from which Mr Deans hails. He told the tribunal: ‘In a professional environment I have never seen someone fist-bump a white new junior. It is customary to shake hands.’

For his part, Mr Rosenblatt said that he fist-bumped Mr Deans because he was elated at having him on his team – a heady delight which I think we can assume dimmed a little during the course of Mr Deans’s tenure. Tribunals can be guilty of astonishing gullibility, of course, but this was too much even for them. Considering Mr Rosenblatt’s greeting of Mr Deans with a fist-bump, the judgment said that the gesture was a ‘misjudgment’ and ‘insensitive’ but did not find the conduct met the threshold for constituting unlawful race-related harassment. The firm was cleared on all charges.

It is an excruciatingly tricky business, isn’t it? How should one greet people from a different background? My own recourse is, I admit, flawed, but at least demonstrates a sensitivity to racial difference. When I am introduced to a person of colour I always shout ‘Kasserian Ingera!’ and then perform a short but evocative dance, in the hope that the person I am greeting hails from the Masai warrior people, for whom this is a traditional salutation.